Category Astronomy/Space

Hubble Space Telescope photo of Mars taken when the planet was 50 million miles from Earth on May 12, 2016.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (ASU), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)

Model describing conditions under which oxygenated water could exist on Mars challenges traditional beliefs about planet’s habitability. A team led by scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, has calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, it could – under specific conditions – contain more oxygen than previously thought possible. According to the model, the levels could even theoretically exceed the threshold needed to support simple aerobic life.

That finding runs contrary to the current, accepted view of Mars and i...

One of NASA’s twin MarCO spacecraft took this image of Mars on October 2 — the first time a CubeSat, a kind of low-cost, briefcase-sized spacecraft — has done so.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s MarCO mission was designed to find out if briefcase-sized spacecraft called CubeSats could survive the journey to deep space. Now, MarCO – which stands for Mars Cube One – has Mars in sight. One of the twin MarCO CubeSats snapped this image of Mars on Oct. 3 – the first image of the Red Planet ever produced by this class of tiny, low-cost spacecraft. The two CubeSats are officially called MarCO-A and MarCO-B but nicknamed “EVE” and “Wall-E” by their engineering team.

A wide-angle camera on top of MarCO-B produced the image as a test of exposure settings...

Violent outbursts of seething gas from young red dwarf stars may make conditions uninhabitable on fledgling planets. In this artist’s rendering, an active, young red dwarf (right) is stripping the atmosphere from an orbiting planet (left). Scientists found that flares from the youngest red dwarfs they surveyed — approximately 40 million years old — are 100 to 1,000 times more energetic than when the stars are older. They also detected one of the most intense stellar flares ever observed in ultraviolet light — more energetic than the most powerful flare ever recorded from our Sun.
Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Player (STScI)

Flares from the youngest red dwarfs surveyed are 100 to 1,000 times more energetic than when the stars are older...

Astronaut on his knees in front of a bush.

With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the Moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from the University of Zurich have shown. The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants’ growth – even under the challenging conditions found in space.

The idea has been bounced around for a while now – and not just by the likes of NASA, but also by private entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk: that of one day establishing colonies for people to live on the Moon or on other planets...